27 weeks pregnant

Your body is getting prepared step by step for the final stage of pregnancy and delivery. Furthermore, you must take into account that pregnancy is more and more noticeable, which means you may suffer from new symptoms, such as back pain.

It’s common for pregnant women to feel pain on the lower back (the area where the kidneys are located). More than 50% of pregnant women feel a stabbing pain in the pelvis, which may appear on one or both sides near the buttocks, and related pain on the inner side of the thighs. They tend to feel these annoyances when they are in a position, or doing exercise in a posture where the hips are bent, such as when they sit on a chair.

Since week 30 is close, you may also have felt Braxton Hicks contractions, which are contractions and relaxations of the uterus. They begin to take place during the sixth week of pregnancy, but the mother starts noticing them from this week on. However, there are women who don’t feel them at all during pregnancy. The abdomen will harden, which doesn’t mean that you don’t have them. These contractions are painless and they prepare the uterus for the moment of birth. The weeks when they are most noticeable are week 29th and week 30th.

During week 27 your child has a highly wrinkled skin, which is protected by the vernix. The lanugo covering his body begins to fall out, decreasing the quantity of body hair.

From this moment on the survival likelihood of the baby increases, if a premature delivery takes place. There are still 13 weeks left for the baby to develop until the moment of birth, but he’s practically fully formed. One of the organs that are still immature are the lungs. They are formed but not mature; they are the last vital organ to be developed. The lung alveoli can’t be kept in the inspiration position, since the substance that keeps them inflated hasn’t formed yet. If the baby was born in this moment, he wouldn’t be able to breathe on his own and would need of assisted breathing. Neither is the hepatic function fully developed and the brain development is still in process.

At the end of this week he is about 36 cm long and weighs 910 grams. If the weight of your child is located between 610 and 1,350 grams you must not worry, since they are also considered normal values.